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Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Pokerstars made a couple changes...

Aight so by now most grinders not living under a rock, and therefore not reading this... are aware of the changes Pokerstars has implemented with respect to SNG's and their tournament lobby. For those unaware of the changes, they can be found here . Now, first I'll go into what I think of the respective changes for the general population, and then how they affect me. First, there has been a ton of slamming going on with respect to how the changes affect low-medium staked grinders, and even further talk about the games being nearly unbeatable. This isn't the case, period. If someone does think the new rake structure has made a Multi-table SnG that was previously beatable for a modest living, (i.e. anywhere from $5 to $50) we can come up with a prop bet... I do not think all of the changes were good for all of the low-mid stakes games, but those games didn't need changes to begin with.... with the exception of the 16's and the ridiculous amount of EV they carried for having such low rake. Epitomised has a table which can be viewed here, summarizing the different changes to the games. If I remember correctly there are three levels which saw an increase to rake, and it was by a marginal enough amount that the games are still healthy and beatable. With respect to what they've done above low-mid stakes, I don't think anyone can complain, as the rake has dropped. It wasn't earth shattering, it wasn't mind blowing... It was what you should expect, a slight adjustment to help winning players maintain a win rate in games that were getting extremely tough. I may get flamed for this response, which is fine.. but no one like money being taken out of their pocket, so I expect most players who spend their time grinding the games that were affected to be in utter shock and totally pissed... Which given the earlier promise of "rake reduction", is probably warranted. For some grinders rake went up, but I genuinely believe that in the 16's it had to, and in the other games its understandable.

The new structure and how I think it will affect grinders. Well, this is simple.. for grinders like myself, my boy Push , or the super sicko doctor Immekus , life is good.. Why, because we play less tables and won't have any problem adjusting to changing blind levels... However, for those players playing more tables, this is obviouisly bad. More blind levels means a different basic set of decisions for each level.. which further complicates things for the 40 tabler, whether its favorable to fish due to the timebank issue or not remains to be seen, but I'll take the drop in rake for losing a blind level... Cheers and good luck!